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Friday, March 27, 2009

The IN VIVO Blog Poll Results: Bye Bye Avandia

The people have spoken, and they expect a long year ahead for GlaxoSmithKline. That’s because Avandia was the run-away winner in our poll based on our purely speculative if not insanely irresponsible notion that the US Food & Drug Administration might just pull a drug to demonstrate that it is taking Congressional concerns about drug safety seriously.

It ain’t scientific, but 42% think Avandia is most likely to be pulled. And, for its worth, that’s twice as many people as think we are crazy to think this way. (See full results below.)

Frankly, we were temped to vote “crazy” ourselves, so we consider this result a bit of surprise.

We also got lots of comments—a few of the “you are crazy” variety (keep it clean, people!), but also some suggesting candidates we didn’t include in the poll. Two votes for Avelox, one for Oxycontin, and one for midrodine. Oh, and one pointing out that we should have listed Accutane for a different side effect.

So folks clearly think there is a risk here.

One final note: the polls closed before readers could digest our two most recent posts, based on our conversation with gadfly and advisory committee member Sid Wolfe. In the first, he--quite unprompted by us--predicted that Celebrex will eventually be withdrawn. In the second, he discussed his relationship with incoming deputy commissioner Joshua Sharfstein.

Celebrex only got 6% of the vote in our poll. Wonder if people feel differently today?


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